upgrade observations

[Joshua Root]

On 2009-7-5 00:54, Rich Morin wrote:
>   *  It would be useful to have a way (eg, port list explicit)
>      to list ports that have been explicitly built on a system.

<http://trac.macports.org/ticket/15260>

>      For example, I've now rebuilt erlang and git-core.  However,
>      when I invoke "port list installed", I see 50+ entries.  If
>      I'm trying to figure out what commands to run, in order to
>      rebuild my ports, this is not terribly useful.

`sudo port -f upgrade installed` will rebuild everything you have
installed. You actually can't just rebuild the top-level ports that you
want to use, all their dependencies need to be rebuilt as well.

Note that this quite probably won't work right as of 1.7, since any
platform variants that were selected on the old machine will be
preserved across upgrades, even when they don't apply to the current
platform.

Also note that `port list` is almost certainly not what you want here;
you probably want `port installed`.

>   *  At a minimum, MacPorts should keep track of processor type
>      information for relocatable binaries, libraries, etc.  The
>      suite should NOT try to build executables from mixtures of
>      PPC and Intel files.

Yep. Recording this information is on the "when we fix the registry" list.

>      It might be nice to offer the user a choice of building an
>      Intel or PPC binary, then using the right input files.

A config option was actually added to svn trunk recently that allows
choosing which arch to build for.

- Josh